Caravaggio and the Antique

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. IRSA s.c. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus et Historiae.The fortuna critica of Caravaggio has been lastingly distorted by the adverse opinion of his contemporaries who, prejudiced by his irregular moral conduct, censured what they saw as a lack of "decorum" in his veristic style, in which they failed to recognize his endorsement of the artistic heritage from which they drew their aesthetic premises.1 The combined efforts of various scholars have helped to correct some of these misconceptions. Recently it has been pointed out that the painting effects that so scandalized his critics were the result of Caravaggio's revolutionary method of staging his models in elaborate tableaux vivants which were then painted directly from nature, with results dramatically different from the artistic norms in fashion at the time.2 Some aspects of Caravaggio's realistic idiom, and its contribution to the significance of the imagery, still remain to be elucidated, however. Among these is the importance of the inspiration he drew from antiquity, which I propose to discuss here.Caravaggio's supposed rejection of the Classical tradition in favor of a direct study of nature was postulated by one of his early biographers, the learned Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who introduced his account of Caravaggio's life by comparing him to the Hellenistic sculptor Demetrios (Demetrius of Alopeke, fourth century B.C.),3 who, according to Quintilian (Institutio oratoria 12:10.9), shared the naturalistic tendency of Lysippus and Praxiteles, but was criticized for carrying verism too far, and for being less concerned with the conventional standards of beauty than with verisimilitude.4 Bellori says that Caravaggio likewise used to paint according to his inclination, so that "he seems to imitate art without knowing what art is about" (pare che senz' arte emulasse l'arte), not only ignoring, but even despising the lofty principles embodied in antique statuary and in the paintings of Raphael, who was then universally admired for his revival of the Classical tradition. The biographer reports that when Caravaggio was shown statues by Phidias and Glykon in order that he might use them as his models, his only answer was to point towards a crowd of people, saying that Nature herself had given him abundant masters.Though such lack of respect for the standard artistic prototypes was repugnant to Bellori, he had to admit that a distinguished precedent for Caravaggio's gesture was to be found in antiquity. Pliny the Elder says that when Eupompus, the famous Sicyonian painter, was asked which of his predecessors he followed, he pointed to a motley assortment of people and said, "All these," ...

Memory's Cut: Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid of 1608

“…51 Scholars have suggested a Roman marble of Eros stringing his bow in the Giustiniani collection as a loose source. 52 If there is no clear classical antecedent for the Laughing Cupid's pose, the Michelangelesque composition and delineation of the body is suggestive yet vexing, recalling the stony forms of Michelangelo's maniera statuina through what Bellori would describe as Caravaggio's art of blood, skin and surfaces. 53 Sources from the period suggest a specifi c model for the boy, apparently Caravaggio's servant and studio hand in these years, known as Cecco del Caravaggio.…”